Development The history of Pink and Taligent from 1988 to 1998 reflects early admiration and high expectations for both the team and its system. In retrospect, the effort is often characterized by
development hell,
second-system effects, internal expansion, secrecy, and ultimately
vaporware.
Pink team Apple's cofounders
Steve Wozniak and
Steve Jobs had departed the company in 1985. This vacuum of entrepreneurial leadership created a tendency to promote low-level engineers up to management and allowed increasingly redundant groups of engineers to compete and co-lead by consensus, and to manifest their own bottom-up corporate culture. In 1988, Apple released
System 6, a major release of the flagship Macintosh operating system, to a
lackluster reception. The system's architectural limits, set forth by the tight hardware constraints of its
original 1984 release, now demanded increasingly ingenious workarounds for incremental gains such as
MultiFinder's
cooperative multitasking, while still lacking
memory protection and
virtual memory. Having committed these engineering triumphs which were often blunted within such a notoriously fragile operating system, Embellishing upon the pink index cards, Pink's overall key design goals were now total
object-orientation,
memory protection,
preemptive multitasking,
internationalization, and advanced graphics. Many ideas from the red cards would later be adopted. After its first two months, Pink had a staff of about 25. Throughout Apple, the project and the system were considered successful, but from April 1989 and on into the 1990s, the running joke had always been and would always be, "When is Pink going to ship? Two years." That essential visual design language would be an influence for several years into Copland,
Mac OS 8, and CommonPoint. Magazines throughout the early 1990s showed various mock-ups of what Pink could look like. The People, Places, and Things metaphor extends beyond the traditional desktop metaphor and provides the user with GUI tools to easily drag documents between people and things, such as fax machines and printers. The component-based document model is similar to what would become
OpenDoc. In mid-1991, Apple CEO John Sculley bragged that Apple had written 1.5 million lines of code for Pink. Even before the signing of the alliance contract, the very existence of Pink was identified as a potential second-system threat if its revolutionary aura could prompt customers to delay their adoption of OS/2. Moving from a temporary lease at Apple headquarters to an office down the street in Cupertino, the company launched with 170 employees,
Culture and purpose Enthusiastically dismissing industry skepticism, he said Taligent would form its own corporate culture, independent of the established cultures and potential failures of its two founding investors and future customers, Apple and IBM. The two were recent allies carrying five other joint initiatives, and a deep rivalry of more than a decade. ''Dr. Dobb's Journal
reflected, "It was fairly surreal for the Apple and IBM employees who went to Taligent and found themselves working for bosses still loyal to the opposition. Not a typical Silicon Valley career move, maybe, but perhaps a portent of other weird twists to come. Ignoring the politics as much as possible, the Taligent programmers buckled down and wrote a lotta lines of code." Commenting on the corporate culture shock of combining free-spirited Apple and formal IBM personnel, Fortune'' compared the company's cultural engineering challenge as possibly exceeding its software engineering challenge. The openminded but sensible CEO reined it in, saying, "I'm tired of [Apple] folklore ... I want some data." Comparing the eager startup Taligent to its billion dollar investors, a leader at Kaleida said "The culture of IBM and Apple is largely about getting more benefits, perks, larger offices, fancier computers, and more employees". ''Dr. Dobb's Journal'' would describe the increased abstraction in corporate culture resulting from Hewlett-Packard's upcoming 1994 addition to the partnership: "Now you could be [a former] Apple programmer working for [a former] IBM boss who reported [externally] to HP. Or some combination thereof. Twisteder and twisteder." and integrated
System Object Model (SOM) and Distributed SOM into OS/2 and AIX. Apple had already delivered
Lisa, prototyped the fully object-oriented Pink operating system, and delivered object oriented frameworks using
MacApp. Both companies had worked with
Smalltalk. The industry was further confused as to the very existence of any Taligent software, not realizing that it was already beyond the concept stage and in fact consisted of volumes of Pink-based software in development by Apple for years. The entire graphics subsystem is 3D, including the 2D portions which are actually 3D constructs. It is based extensively on object-oriented frameworks from the kernel upward, including device drivers, the Taligent
input/output (I/O) system, and ensembles. By 1993, IBM discussed decoupling most of TalOS away from its native Opus microkernel, and retargeting most of TalOS onto the IBM Microkernel which was already used as the base for IBM's tandem project,
Workplace OS. In January 1993, Taligent's VP of Marketing said the strong progress of native TalOS development could encourage its early incremental release prior to the full 1995 schedule for TalAE. Apple's business manager to Taligent
Chris Espinosa acknowledged the irony of Apple and IBM building competing Taligent-based platforms, which had originated at Apple as Pink. He forecast Apple's adoption of Taligent components into the irreplaceably personal Mac OSwhile empowering its competitiveness with IBM's future Taligent-based general purpose systems, and easing corporate users' migration toward Apple's Enterprise Systems Division's future Taligent-based computers. On January 10, 1993,
The Wall Street Journal reported on the state of Taligent, saying the company and its platform had the broad optimistic support of
Borland,
WordPerfect, and
Novell. Borland CEO Philippe Kahn said "Technically, [Pink] is brilliant, and Taligent is running much faster than I expected." A software venture capitalist expected new entrepreneurs to appreciate the platform's newness and lack of legacy baggage, and the industry expected Apple loyalists to embrace a new culture. Regardless of genuine merit, many in the industry reportedly expected Taligent's success to depend upon wounding Microsoft's monopoly. On January 18,
InfoWorld reported, "Taligent draws rave reviews from software developers". By April 1993, Taligent, Inc. had grown to about 260 employees, mostly from Apple or "some other loose Silicon Valley culture". Bedrock would be abruptly discontinued 18 months later with no successor, and leaving Apple with no connection between System 7 and Pink. By 1994, the platform consisted of Taligent Object Services (TOS or TalOS), Taligent Application Environment (TAE or TalAE), and the Taligent Development System (TDS or TalDS). Influenced by the results of the survey effort, CEO Joe Guglielmi acknowledged the unavoidable risk of creating its own
second-system effect, if the TalAE enhancements could make third party operating systems into competitors of native TalOS. The first internal development environment was an IBM
RS/6000 model 250 with a
PowerPC 601 CPU running AIX, In November 1994 at Comdex, the public debut of third-party TalAE applications was on an RS/6000 running AIX to demonstrate prototypes made by seven vendors. was renamed to CommonPoint,
ComputerWorld described the enterprise computing market as shifting away from monolithic and procedural application models and even application suites, toward object-oriented component-based application frameworks, all in Taligent's favor. Its theoretical newness was often compared to NeXT's older but mature and commercially established platform.
Sun Microsystems held exploratory meetings with Taligent before deciding upon building out its object application framework
OpenStep in partnership with
NeXT as a "preemptive move against Taligent and [Microsoft's]
Cairo". Having given up on seeing Pink go to market soon, Apple publicly announced Copland in March 1994 intended to compete with the upcoming Windows 95. In June 1994, Taligent shipped its first deliverable, considered to be somewhat late for its three investors and approximately 100 developer companies. It is a prebeta developer preview called the Partners Early Experience Kit (PEEK), consisting of 80 frameworks for AIX and OS/2. It received mixed reviews, with
InfoWorld saying it is "inhibited by a massive footprint, a shortage of development tools, and a mind-boggling complexity". TalDE was scheduled to ship in Q2 1995. Those vendors are intended to port and bundle TalAE directly with their operating systems, and Taligent will port for those who don't. On July 28, 1995, Taligent shipped its first final product, CommonPoint 1.1, after seven years in development as Pink and then TalAE. First released only for its reference platform of
AIX, it was initially priced at for only the runtime framework for users; or for the runtime framework and the software development kit, which further requires the Cset++ compiler because TalDE is still scheduled for a later release. The runtime has an overhead of for each machine and total system RAM is recommended. Several PEEK beta test sites and final release customers were very pleased with the platform, though disappointed in the marked lack of crossplatform presence on HP/UX, Mac OS, and Windows NT which strictly limited any adoption of CommonPoint even among enthusiasts. IBM reportedly conducted a "full-court press" to analyze and promote customers' awareness of CommonPoint, by training its direct sales and consulting staff, attending industry conferences to make CommonPoint presentations, and "talking with any third-party software vendor and systems integrator who will listen". This was coincidentally the same day as the
gold master of the Workplace OS final beta, IBM's complementary cousin operating system to TalOS. The final beta of Workplace OS was released on January 5, 1996, in the form of OS/2 Warp Connect (PowerPC Edition) and then immediately discontinued without ever receiving a release of CommonPoint. During the same period, Apple's Copland project reached a developer preview release with stability issues. Apple's operating system strategy at the time had not produced a platform capable of running Taligent software.
New leadership By 1995, it was estimated that the three investors had spent more than $100 million on Taligent, Inc., In September 1995, CEO Joe Guglielmi unexpectedly exited Taligent to become VP of Motorola, intensifying the industry's concerns. Dick Gurino, a general manager of a PC and software development division at IBM, was named the interim CEO and tasked with searching for a permanent CEO. In October 1995, Gurino died of a heart attack while jogging, leaving the company without a CEO. On December 19, 1995, founding Taligent employee and Apple veteran Debbie Coutant was promoted to CEO. Through 1997, Taligent was at the core of IBM's companywide shift to a Java-based middleware strategy. Taligent provided all Unicode internationalization support for Sun's 1997 release of
Java Development Kit 1.1 through 1.1.4. WebRunner is a set of
Java- and
JavaBeans-based development tools at $149. In June 1997, Places for Project Teams was launched at $49 per user as a groupware GUI which hides the ugly interface of
Lotus Notes. trademarks, and patents. Apple canceled the unstable and unfinished Copland project in August 1996, which had already been presumptively renamed "Mac OS 8", again leaving only a System 7 legacy. Apple's own book
Mac OS 8 Revealed (1996) had been the definitive final roadmap for Copland, naming the platform's competitors and allies, and yet its 336 pages contain no mention of Pink or Taligent. In late 1996, Apple was ever more desperately scrambling to find any operating system strategy whatsoever beyond System 7, even after having already planned its upcoming announcement of it to be made in December 1997.
Dissolution On September 16, 1997, IBM announced that Taligent Inc. would be dissolved by the end of the year, with its approximately 100 software engineers being "offered positions at IBM's Santa Teresa Laboratory to work on key components for IBM's VisualAge for Java programming tools, and at the recently announced Java porting center that IBM is setting up with Sun Microsystems and Netscape". IBM withdrew CommonPoint for OS/2 from the market on August 3, 1999. ==Reception==